Sendbird Alternatives 2026

The right Sendbird alternative depends on the job Sendbird does for you. If it runs chat inside your own app, replace it with another chat SDK: Stream, CometChat or Twilio's Conversations API. If you bought it so customers could reach your support team, a support inbox replaces it with no SDK work at all. Every price below was read off the vendor's own pricing page, and each link carries the date we checked it.

What does Sendbird cost in September 2026?

Sendbird prices its Chat API by monthly active users (MAU): anyone who connects to Sendbird through your app's client SDK within the past 30 days. Its plan cards read as follows (sendbird.com/pricing/chat, checked 24 September 2026):

• Free trial: up to 1,000 MAU and 20 peak concurrent connections, all Pro features, no credit card, community support, and no overages allowed.
• Starter: $349/month billed annually or $399/month billed monthly for 5,000 MAU, with messaging essentials, basic moderation and 8x5 ticketed support.
• Pro: $499/month billed annually or $599/month billed monthly for the same 5,000 MAU, adding translation, data export, image moderation and supergroup channels.
• Enterprise: custom pricing "for millions of MAU", dedicated or shared servers, 24x7 Gold or Platinum support, and a customer success manager at $50,000 in annual recurring revenue.

Two limits sit under the cards. Peak concurrent connections on Starter and Pro are capped at 5% of your MAU limit, and Sendbird counts devices, not users, so a 5,000-MAU plan allows 250 open connections and one user on a phone and a laptop counts twice. Messages are kept for six months on every self-serve plan; longer retention is an Enterprise quote. Each paid plan also includes 30,000 in-app Business Messaging messages, which Sendbird values at $122 a month.

Which Sendbird prices are out of date?

Many comparison pages, this one included until 24 September 2026, quote Sendbird Starter at $499 for 10,000 MAU and $1,199 for 25,000 MAU, and Pro at $749 and $1,799. Those figures come from an FAQ table on Sendbird's own pricing page headed "Latest Sendbird pricing (June, 2021)". Its 5,000-MAU row ($399 Starter, $599 Pro) matches today's month-to-month price, so the higher rows are most likely monthly rates too, but they are more than five years old and the current plan cards do not repeat them. The cards say Starter and Pro stretch to 100,000 MAU; get the price for your MAU band in writing before you budget above 5,000.

The free tier has the same problem. Sendbird's February 2022 launch post describes a free Developer plan capped at 100 MAU and 10 peak concurrent connections (sendbird.com/blog, published 22 February 2022). The current pricing FAQ still says the Developer plan stays free as long as you log in once a year, but the plan cards show only the 1,000-MAU trial and publish no Developer limits.

Data export is the third trap. The Pro card lists it, yet the Enterprise FAQ on the same page says Data Export is one of the features "not available to customers of the Starter and Pro plans". If you are leaving Sendbird, confirm in writing which export your contract includes before you give notice.

Which chat SDKs replace Sendbird inside your app?

If your users message each other, or message your team from inside your product, you need another SDK. These three publish enough pricing to set against Sendbird's 5,000-MAU rung.

Stream Chat

Stream's Start plan is $399/month billed annually or $499 billed monthly for 10,000 MAU and 500 concurrent connections, with data export included. Overage is $0.09 per extra MAU and $0.99 per extra concurrent connection. The free Build plan covers 1,000 MAU and 100 concurrent connections, and teams of fewer than five people with under $10,000 in monthly revenue can apply for a Maker account worth $100 of monthly credit. Translation needs the Elevate plan ($599 annually, $675 monthly) and costs $2 per 1,000 translations. Messages are stored for as long as the plan is active, up to 5 million on Start (getstream.io/chat/pricing, checked 24 September 2026). At list price that is twice Sendbird Starter's MAU for $50 more a month on annual billing.

CometChat

CometChat's free Build plan is for development and covers 100 users. Its paid Basic and Advanced plans include concurrent connections at 5% of MAU, the same ratio as Sendbird, and charge $0.10 per MAU and $1 per concurrent connection over the limit; Enterprise includes 10% concurrency with no overages. Messages are retained for six months on every plan. CometChat's headline prices change with a user-count selector, so read them at your own MAU rather than trusting a single quoted figure (cometchat.com/pricing, checked 24 September 2026).

Twilio Conversations API

Twilio charges per active user with no subscription: the first 200 users are free, then $0.05 per user per month, falling to $0.0475 from 5,001 users and $0.045 from 10,001. A user is counted once a month even across channels, and the same API carries in-app chat, SMS, MMS, WhatsApp and Messenger, with standard SMS and WhatsApp rates charged on top (twilio.com/en-us/conversations/pricing, marked current as of August 2026, checked 24 September 2026). At 5,000 active users that is roughly $240 to $250 a month before message fees, about 30% below Sendbird Starter's annual rate.

When is a support inbox the better Sendbird alternative?

If Sendbird's job is letting customers reach your support team, you are paying per MAU for messaging infrastructure and then building the agent side yourself. Sendbird's own support product is now a separate AI agent platform, delight.ai, sold through demos with no public price (delight.ai, checked 24 September 2026). Support inboxes price by agent rather than by end user, so a growing user base does not move the bill:

• Intercom: Essential is $29 per seat per month billed annually or $39 monthly, plus $0.99 for each Fin AI outcome; WhatsApp, SMS and phone are pay-as-you-go (intercom.com help centre, checked 24 September 2026).
• Zendesk: Suite Team is $55 per agent per month paid yearly (zendesk.com/pricing, checked 18 September 2026).
• Converge: $49/month flat rate for up to 15 agents, with a website chat widget, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, Zalo OA, Discord, email and X in one inbox.

Who should not switch from Sendbird to Converge?

Anyone whose chat lives inside their own product should stay on Sendbird or move to one of the SDKs above. That covers marketplace buyer-to-seller chat, in-game and livestream chat, dating and community apps, and patient messaging built into a telehealth app. Converge has no public chat SDK or API: the only thing you embed is its website chat widget, and every conversation lands in an agent inbox rather than passing between two of your users. It has no voice or video calling, which Sendbird sells as a separate Calls product, and its WhatsApp channel only replies to customers who message first, so it is not a tool for proactive WhatsApp notifications. It fits the other case: a support team answering customers across channels that would otherwise build an inbox on top of a chat API.